NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: CENTRAL PARK; Restoring Vaux's Vision, One Tile At a Time

By JAKE MOONEY

Published: July 16, 2006

OF the joggers, stroller-pushers and tourists who passed the Bethesda Fountain on Central Park's 72nd Street Drive on a humid morning last week, few noticed all the activity going on just below their feet, in the cavernous sandstone passage known as the Bethesda Terrace Arcade.

Of course, there hadn't been much to notice in the space since 1984, when workers removed the nearly 16,000 intricately patterned clay tiles from the ceiling, directly under the transverse, for restoration.

The tiles, which were designed in part by Calvert Vaux, were in worse shape than anyone had thought, and the Central Park Conservancy, the nonprofit group that manages the park, lacked the money to restore them. The 49 ceiling panels, which were completed in 1868 and were part of the original park plan, went into storage, where most of them stayed for 20 years.

The conservancy restored and remounted two of the panels in 1998, and in 2002, Evelyn West, a Brooklyn Heights resident with a longstanding interest in historic preservation, bequeathed $3.5 million to the conservancy to finish the job. Now, workers have added new waterproofing to the roof and are hanging three more of the restored one-ton panels this month for inspection by city agencies.

Meanwhile, conservancy technicians are working in a shed and a trailer in the park just north of the Ramble, inspecting each tile, with an array of cleaning fluids, paints and putties at the ready. The restored arcade should be open to the public by the end of the year.

''It's a rare thing to be able to say you're doing a preservation undertaking of this magnitude -- and we're doing it right here in the park,'' Douglas Blonsky, the conservancy president, said last week.

In the trailer, one technician, Elizabeth Saetta, said the hardest tiles to clean were those stained with rust from the roadway supports -- removing the rust can take a month. Fixing a chip with putty can take two or three days. On average, the restoration team has cleaned four 324-tile panels a month; because some tiles, handmade in England by the Minton Company, are damaged beyond repair, the ceiling will include several panels of new tiles made with the same techniques.

In general, though, the original roof is in good shape. ''It lasted 140, 150 years -- that ain't bad,'' Mr. Blonsky said, ''considering there was a lot of water, a lot of salt, a wet location that never dried out.''

James Reed, the project's director, named another hazard that has been an inescapable part of Central Park life: ''Kids throwing Spaldeen balls against it.'' JAKE MOONEY

Photos: Technicians are restoring, or replacing, the 16,000 handmade tiles at the Bethesda Terrace Arcade. (Photographs by Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times)